Information is commonly exchanged over the internet via web applications run in web browsers. The ease of such information exchange has led to the proliferation of online collaborations. Rudimentary online collaborations involved leaving an ongoing exchange of messages at messaging boards, simply posting data on different web pages, etc. These methods of collaboration, however, were not very collaborative.
Specialized collaboration systems were therefore developed to facilitate specific types of collaborations. For example, a document may be collaboratively edited by multiple users who check out a document from a store, edit the document, and check the edited document back into the store. Such systems, however, are run by proprietary applications that provide only a single type of collaboration on limited types of data. Furthermore, if a user desires to access information, statistics, or other data not provided by the collaboration system, the user must leave the collaboration. This diverts a users attention, refocuses them on another task, and otherwise removes the user from the flow of an ongoing collaboration.